Tales of Post-Twinkie Ennui
Nemr and I took a little trip up the coast today, for BBQed oysters at Tony’s in Tomales, a stop at Bodega to pay homage to Hitchcock and his birds, the windy windy Sonoma Coast and River Road, a few wineries on the West Side Drive, a tipsy time with the sexiest pourer in the Dry Creek region, and to end an otherwise perfect day, we resisted the lure of Sonoma County cuisine and gave in to baser caloric requirements at In ‘n Out Burger.
My Superhairymodel Dean and I—low rollers, we—drove to Reno on Friday, raked in $5, visited Dean’s mom, saw the most spectacular sunset—really, it was like the sky was on fire—and ate really cheap, big food.
Big Chrissy and I spent a week visiting his parental units in the heart of this great nation. We discovered that Captain Kirk was, or rather, will be born in a town only an hour away from his mom’s, so we had to drive over and pay homage. There are serious Trekkies who live there and are anxiously awaiting his arrival. The drive through Iowa was just like in the Regionalist paintings of the 30’s—lush, rolling hills and beautiful old farmhouses, red barns. Corn everyfuckingwhere. We also spent a day in Divorce Court with BC’s sister, found a few Lustron Houses in the area to visit (post WWII prefabricated porcelain-enameled steel houses), gained about 10 pounds, stopped at the World’s Largest Truck Stop, which contained the World’s Largest People, saw a great show at the Figge in Davenport, the highlight of which was a mural that Jackson Pollock painted for Peggy Guggenheim, an amazing transition from the recognizable to the abstract, had deep-dish pizza in Chicago and visited the new addition to the Art Institute, which we both agreed was pretty sweet.
The week before I was in Alabama visiting my own parents, and old buddies from my childhood. Since I’ve been on a fairly limited diet for most of the year, I went a little crazy and consumed every fried thing that could be found. In one Meat-n-3 that I went to with my buddy James on the edge of Birmingham, we were treated to a culinary experience that was like being in an MGM musical. A baptist church had just let out, so everyone was very snazzily dressed, in zoot suits, hats… Everyone was happy, even the waitresses, who kept bringing us free things to eat. The women were like Venuses of Willendorf poured from Jell-o molds, jiggling gravity-defying masses of bodaciousness on heels, just amazing how they moved through space. I had fried okra, collard greens, fried green tomatoes, a fried pork chop, and squash casserole. If there were more fried things on the menu, I would have ordered them.
James and I went on a little Catholic kitsch outing one day and went to the Ave Maria Grotto and the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament, near Cullman. Cullman is a lovely southern town, settled by Germans in the late 1800s. Dry, still. I think it’s the only city that celebrates Oktoberfest without beer. The Ave Maria Grotto is a kind of magical place, a landscaped garden with miniature reproductions of historic buildings and shrines around the world. You know, like the Castle of the Fairies, and the grave of Lazarus… These tiny structures of stone and concrete were made by Brother Joseph Zoettl, a Benedictine monk of St. Bernard Abbey, over a 40 year period beginning in the early 30s.
The Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament, on the other hand, is the kind of cathedral where they don’t tell you in the parking lot which is about a quarter mile from the cathedral that exposed flesh is not welcome so they turn you around the moment you walk into the church with those shorts on all sweaty from that hot southern sun and ask you to change into pants but because you left your pants in the car then you have to walk across that huge plaza again to change your clothes in the parking lot and then walk all the way back across that plaza made out of cheapy cast stone with no shade anywhere just to see this pretty lousy reproduction of an italian basilica and develop a rash while Jesus, without pants, I might add, looks down, unhappily, from his wooden perch.
BC and I are back in San Francisco, where, really, I look 10 years younger than I did in New York. I think it’s the predominance of grays and blues in New York, which are just not part of the flattering side of my color chart, a deficiency of green and beige, the near absence of pastels. Upon getting home, I immediately threw on a pink shirt and pulled out my neti pot and washed that city right out of my nose.
Our last day in NYC was spent visiting the galleries in Chelsea, where we didn’t see much to blog about, except for Lisa Yuskavage’s fabulous show at David Zwirner, where green was dominant, her bosomy babes nestled in verdant landscapes, legs spread, a pie in the face… Her mastery over paint and technique forces an engagement with such disturbing imagery, well, disturbing to this homosexualist, and an inquisitiveness into unraveling the almost cinematically spurting content.
Having never been to the United Nations, we walked over from Chelsea. They wouldn’t let us see much, as it was a weekend, and what a dump. The walls were seeping, the grand side entry was completely covered up with security tents, no curatorial will exerted over the awful member nation “gifts” stuffed into every nook and cranny… Isn’t there a feng shui person on staff? This is not the qi of international progress.
We continued our walk back to Times Square and bought tickets for one more show, Impressionism starring Jeremy Irons and Joan Allen. The play seeks to create a theatrical and romantic equivalent of the impressions that the painters of the late 19th century sought to capture on canvas. Unfortunately, the only impressions left on us were closer to those of branding irons. Message after message was seared into the flesh of the helpless audience. We didn’t find out until after that people had been walking out during intermission while the show was still in previews, so the producers cut the play and eliminated intermission. We were trapped! But Barbara Walters was in the audience! When she walked in, just a few seconds before the curtain went up, all heads turned her way and you could hear whispered “Barbara” “Babawa” “Baabaa” like little sheep.
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BC and I checked out the Martin Kippenberger exhibition at MoMA today. It’s a really great show for people with limited attention spans, as he didn’t really stick to any one style or subject for too long, and the vastness of his output is quite entertaining, and he appeals to those who like to read wall labels and delve into the artist’s intent, as most of the work is saturated with meaning and references to art historical figures and movements. It seems very much like he was dealing with the last days of modernism as well as his own life. The last body of work on view at the museum is his reworking of the Raft of the Medusa, paintings and prints that convey a sense of an artist trying to come to terms with the past but unable to hang on, with little of the humor or irony of the earlier work—very powerful and moving.
Tonight we saw Eugene Ionesco’s fantastic Exit the King at the Barrymore Theatre, starring Susan Sarandon, Geoffrey Rush, and Lauren Ambrose. Susan Sarandon tells her husband, the king, “You are going to die in an hour and a half. You are going to die at the end of this play.” The comic absurdity of the narrative somehow manages also to be emotionally wrenching, the story basically about a man, the king, learning to die.
New York to me is the smell of creosote and cigarette smoke. And Magnolia cupcakes.
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BC and I started the day at the Neue Galerie, to see an exhibition of works by the Brücke, an early 20th Century group of artists who ushered in German Expressionism with their utopian scribbly primary-colored green-peopled bridge between past and future post-impressionism. Downstairs I spent most of my time oogling the Josef Hoffmann objects from the Wiener Werkstätte, and the beautiful Klimt and eerily beautiful Schiele paintings. Across the street at the Met, we viewed an exhibition of late interiors by Pierre Bonnard, made over a 20 year period in which neither his palette, subject matter, nor style changed in the slightest. They are dazzling works of color and form, and the compositions made me more aware of framing than any art in recent memory. For instance, lines of painted surfaces are almost always parallel to the lines of the picture frame. He even alters rules of perspective to bend this table or that window into proper alignment. The compositions are also crammed into the picture space, creating a claustrophobic visual and sensual experience of light, fruit and french charcuterie.
For dinner we went to Lidia Bastianich’s Becco on W. 46th. We shared a perfect Caesar salad and mixed appetizers including a squid salad, poached swordfish, marinated beans and miscellaneous vegetables. For our primi piatti, we each had the presso fisso meal, which included 3 pastas each: an asparagus risotto; rigatoni with tomato and basil; and fettuccine with a bolognese meat sauce. Desert for two was like desert for 10 in San Francisco and consisted of a ricotta cheesecake, bread pudding, passionfruit sorbet, vanilla panna cotta… and I’m sure some other fabulously tasty thing that I’m forgetting about. There is so much pleasure in her cooking and so much flavor. You can’t go there and not overeat.
The women sitting next to us at Becco were straight out of The Sopranos. One sounded exactly like Rosalie Aprile. The waiter even called her “Ro!” I couldn’t tell if her name was given by her parents or non-ironic viewers of the show. The two from New Jersey loudly discussed how lucky they were to be surviving in this economy with only two houses each. “We are so lucky, Ro.”
Continuing with the Sopranos theme, we then went to see James Gandolfini, Marcia Gay Harden, Jeff Daniels and Hope Davis in Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage. What a knockout play! Two couples get together to discuss a fight that their kids had. They try very sincerely to be nice to each other, but end up drunk, mercilessly tearing into each other, and nearly destroying the apartment. And 50 tulips.
Big Chrissy and I are in the Big Apple again. We arrived a few hours ago, dropped off our luggage and made our way to see Angela Lansbury, Rupert Everett, Christine Ebersole and Jayne Atkinson in the revival of Noël Coward’s Blithe Sprit at the Shubert. It was delightfully entertaining, with Angela Lansbury performing a pre-trance sort of egypto-jig that had the crowd roaring. Rupert Everett is still as intoxicatingly handsome as he was 30 years ago, and he looks exactly the same. At least from row “R.” The play’s queasy content—astral bigamy, murder, infidelity—are wittily folded into the farcical narrative and delivered for nothing but giggles.
New York stinks. It’s dirty and smelly and everybody wears black and smokes and I’m so happy to be here.
Sheesh, I just looked at this blog and realized I have written hardly anything this year. What’s the deal? Well, the turns that life has taken this year resemble a bit too closely the turns taken last year, and the year before. And probably the year before; trips to the south, the midwest, dates with all the wrong but-incredibly-sexy guys, Big Chrissy, Dean, the theater, opera, movies, expensive restaurants, visiting europeans, art… I’m clinging to the tail end of my mid-life crisis, the point where resignation and contentment are supposed to align and the new era begins. I see myself teetering, ready to roll into new experience, but held back by the comfort of the familiar and the dogged determination to not let go, not just yet. I might be consoled by the cyclical nature of my unfulfilled desires and experiences, but writing about them again and again is just going to be boring for you, gentle readers.
Yesterday was my 43rd birthday. The weekend was pretty fabulous, with many dinners, a carrot cake (like last year), a chocolate raspberry mousse cake, loved ones, barbequed oysters, the Sonoma Coast, movies, the Legion of Honor… Big Chrissy surprised me by purchasing most of the books on cooking that I don’t yet have that were mentioned in the recent article in The Art of Eating titled “Throw the Rest Out.” Tonight Bob’s taking me to the Old Mandarin Islamic Restaurant to continue the birthday season. Imagine Mandarin Chinese food, but with lamb and middle eastern spices.
I want there to be more films by Fatih Akin. They’re about how life is, not how we want it to be.
Lately, when I’ve thought that maybe putting some stones in my pocket and walking into the Pacific would be easier than trying to get a New York show, my vision of hell pops up and steers me away from the water. I’ve never gone for those visions of hell that include fire and screaming naked people. In mine, all of my close friends, family, teachers, favorite writers and directors–all of us would be forced to watch my life projected in its unedited entirety on hell’s big movie screen. And the seats would be just like the SF Opera House balcony–all cramped and everybody’s elbows jabbed into the sides of their neighbors. There I’d be picking my nose, singing off key in the car, doing things in the bathroom I never imagined being seen—in Cinemascope. I could see Preston Sturges in the audience laughing at my first date, Einstein getting excited by my posing in the mirror, my mother weeping silently. Not that I believe in hell, or heaven, really. Well, maybe, it’s just all that Catholic indoctrination. Somewhere in the back of my head it’s still there, preventing me from answering the call of the waves. It’s ambition, albeit a very lazy ambition, as well as my fear of Hell’s Cineplex, this belief that this something that I have to say hasn’t found the right place yet, or a prospective buyer. They’re out there, though, and I’m still looking.
Speaking of… I saw Connie Champagne a few weeks ago, with my friend Doug. She performed as Judy Garland at the Columbarium, surrounded by adoring gay men and the ashes of their buddies. Convinced and confused by her illusion, guys kept periodically yelling “We love you, Judy!” Sincerely. She went through most of the standard Judy tunes, but knocked our socks off with a version of “Bohemian Rhapsody” that captured all of Judy’s mannerisms and quirks in a performance that was also pure bubbly Connie Champagne.
Big Chrissy and I played in the snow a few weeks ago, too, flying out to visit his family in the Quad Cities, Midwest. I don’t see how people can complain about snow, it’s the most beautiful thing to see.
My sisters visited for the New Year holiday, all of them, and Carol’s husband, Bruce, and mother-in-law, Margaret. Margaret took me and the Underbears out one night to Range, just her and the boys. I had this roasted chicken that was like something that made me believe we were in heaven right then and there. The skin was like paper, really good-tasting chicken-flavored paper, and the meat like butter. Margaret was the best house guest ever. She preferred the heat turned down really low most of the time, unlike every other person her age, and she kept buying me things and taking me out for expensive meals. We’d go out to a really expensive nursery to look at pots, I’d say, “Wow, isn’t that really expensive terra cotta sculptured pot amazing?” and the next thing I knew she was at the cash register getting it rung up.
Hiroshi Sugimoto curated two of my favorite shows of last year, both at the Asian Art Museum, and still up to see. One is called “A History of History,” and includes highly refined objects, mostly Japanese antiques, from 500,000,000 years ago to the recent present, fossils that he relates to photography in that they were the first things to capture and preserve the essence of something once alive, a Nara period scroll in platinum and silver ink on indigo-dyed paper, with the entire bottom burned off that he unraveled and mounted on beautiful paper, his own photographs, one seascape arranged to be seen inverted through a Kamakura-era miniature pagoda that he’s retrofitted with a glass sphere–things that make thinking visible, he says. The other show is a display of avant-garde Japanese couture dresses, some of which he’s photographed, a few of the photos shown alongside the actual dresses. The dresses are all sculptural wrappings for the female form that seem drawn from history and science fiction–a dress that could also be a chair, a contemporary knit outfit with a tube-like bustle, another stuffed with padding to deform and disguise the body.
Speaking of galleries, I finally shlepped over to Margaret Tedesco’s 2nd Floor Projects gallery, in her apartment on 25th Street. Everyone should go, it’s a great space, intimate. One could say homey. Jill Miller was showing a body of work created as a result of the surveillance of several local collectors. She studied with a real private eye to prepare for the project, and the installation looked like something a real private investigator would have set up in his 25th Street Mission apartment. Jill was there, just absolutely gorgeous. I thought that she looked more like the person cast as the artist in the movie about her than the artist herself. The project seemed like a way of entrapping collectors into engaging with her work, very little of them actually revealed. We all do our best to get them to come see our shows–Jill printed a tabloid with pictures of them under surveillance and sent it to them, inviting them to see the show. Good for her.
More updates later…
Wednesday…
I’m on the plane from Dallas to Birmingham, zipping across the south to visit with my parents. The flight’s not full at all–who goes to Birmingham in August? The plane to Dallas was jam-packed, and the guy with the hairiest forearms in Texas sat right next to me. His elbows extended slightly into my space, and my arm, moving up and down due to my accelerated breathing, gently brushed against his furriness. He was wearing shorts, too, and had gorgeous thick brown tree-trunk legs covered in blonde fur. I didn’t look at the rest of him. I didn’t need the rest of him. I was suddenly relieved that I hadn’t brought my first reading choice, I Love Dick, by Chris Kraus, and could hide behind less-suggestive titles. Instead I read about the more appropriate bonobos, ape cousins of the chimpanzees–distinct from chimps with their smaller heads, dominant females, easy-going peaceful nature, and frequent and incessant copulation.
I met a few really interesting fellows last week: one a corporate executive in New York with tattoos that you can barely see under his dense body hair; the other an artist bodybuilder who sells a “product” that sounds a lot like steroids; another guy whose moniker is something close to “largeorganedbottom” who sounds too good to be true; and about three guys who are all the same age, with the same look, jobs, dispositions, and male-pattern baldness. I’d love to take the last three out on a reality-series type date where a panel of Coco Libido Specialists eliminates two for me.
On the plane I’ve been catching up on not only the apes, but also the problem and history of spam, Gustave Courbet, honey bees, and Gerald and Sara Murphy. You know, there’s a major die-out of bees that’s been going on, with whole colonies of honey bees just disappearing. They call it Colony Collapse Disorder, and the bees that have been examined seem to have something like Bee AIDS, their entire immune system wrecked as scores of parasites, mites, and viruses attack their whole system. There aren’t a lot of pollinators like bees, who’ll go for just about any flower. Our entire (commercial) food chain depends on them. I love bees. The males are just around to mate, then after being tolerated by the female workers, are systematically destroyed by them.
I am arrived. It is hot. At 10pm the temperature is 100 degrees. My cute little mommy made salmon patties, salad, and miniature low-fat strawberry cheesecakes for me! It’s hot as hell, but I’m in heaven!
Thursday…
Today I spent the afternoon with James, my total-queen high school buddy. They don’t make queens like they do in the south. His house is Fabu-Chic White Trash, all the walls different saturated colors, whimsical thrift shop furniture and paintings everywhere. He even has a complete Avon after-shave chess set. He lives in Adamsville, which is about a 40 minute drive from my parents’ house. In the absence of markers like rivers or town grids, I never know which way is north or south, just which road leads to which road, which ‘dale is next to which ‘ville. The countryside was absolutely beautiful, lush rolling hills and bright green kudzu. On the way to Adamsville I listened to country music turned up real loud. …two peas in a po-od—me and Go-od… I listen to country music unironically here, and feel the sincerity behind all the Jesus-loving and wife-cheating.